Meanings, Messages & Signals
Little children knew the difference between the machine and the performer long, long ago. Little children and romantics. The music box, with its innumerable coded stipples, is a digital reproduction device. So obviously the spirit of machines, it is incapable of expressions. Once coded, the device rings out its hauntingly disembodied melodies, never betraying the emotions of the designer. Its brass cylinder slowly turns out the twinkling chimes… without a soul.
Made to best suit the musical expressions of the times, CD media best prevailed as the perfect storage medium. Emotionless expressions lacking detail or finesse are best recorded in digital format..where emotional content is not important. Oh yes, the sounds, the signals, were perfect. Perfect but inert. Perfect but vacant. Perfect, like statues are perfect. But alive, capable of transacting emotional volume? Certainly not
GLASS WINDOWS
The historical development of recording sciences haying been summarized here, we have seen that the technical goal of reproducing the live performance feel has never been realized. Can it indeed be reached? If not, we need to know why. All recording systems are overtone “synthesizers”, heirs of the erroneous Helmholtz overtone synthesis theory. Recording systems are subject to every failure which the Helmholtz theory compels. In the acousticians’ lexicon of ideas there was no reason why a recording should not sound exactly like a live instrument.
Like the grand pipe organ makers of the century before, recording industries believed that an improved recording science could actually reproduce the very presence of live musicians. Locked in a curious tautology which consistently brought them face-to-face with live performance, acousticians could not read the simple message in the maze. Struggling with their “missing component” paradigm for decades, they somehow failed to recognize the significance of what they were seeking. The essential missing component was not an audio feature at all, it was similacrum of life. Generating life… in the medium.
No acoustician could ever read the message which their own senses informed because they were trained to ignore their senses! Ignoring their senses, they continued perfecting systems and technologies which continually eradicated sense and consciousness. Alienating science. Alienating technology.
Despite the dramatic magnifications in recorded fidelity, reductions in noise, complete revisions of recording modes however graphic or noise free, no media-stored overtones could either synthesize or reproduce the “live performance” sensation. It is the thing which most people call “presence”. Yes, musical or speech recordings are indeed missing a component. A QUALITATIVE component.
Like glass windows through which we “see and do not touch”, we FEEL the inherent separation between musical recordings and ourselves. The feeling does not pass away however “educated” in the quantitative explanations we become. The separation, the isolation between ourselves and recorded sound persists in domains which surpass the mere acoustic signals. How is it that recording technology, however advanced, isolates percipients from all of the live sensations projected by live performers?
SENSORTUM
Because quantitative analysis so effectively filters out all human experiential components, it is therefore incapable of supplying human percipients with real information concerning their own experience. It is impossible for statistically assessed data tables, sourced in inertial measuring tools, to make dictations to experience. Experience is the superior. Measurement the inferior. The elegant acoustic physics which Helmholtz pioneered empirically failed to perform its own ideal. Therefore, to answer these questions pertaining to media, we must pass outside of the limiting quantitative confines into Qualitative world examinations.
Human experience is the final criterion and aim of all reproduction media. The media and Media Industries exist to serve human experience. The media and Media Industry do not make dictations to fundamental consciousness which exceeds human agency.
In the ancient-view, the world was flooded with fluidic and freely mobile sensations. Sensations were known and mapped as world-permeating currents which all living things intercepted and experienced in varied degrees. Specific places flowed with specific sensations, honored as sacred zones. Ancient maps show these winds and currents, tracings which correspond to no water courses, however anciently examined.
All sensations were understood to be externally sourced currents, inherent in nature and continuous in extent. Experience was seen as an internal reception of external continuity. Emotion and sensation were world-inherent, not applied or projected. Sensation proceeded from the world into human experience without change. In the ancient view, what we feel is what permeates the world. There is no change in the interception, save one of intensity or completeness. Human experience was anciently seen as a small fraction of world-permeations which angelic beings of greater purity knew. Each sentient being experienced some part of the magnificent whole.
By this view, emotion and sensation are world-inherent They are received into and sampled by the human sensorium, becoming EXPERIENCE. Human beings, as recipients, are not autonomic generators of sensation. Sensation is not limited to this body as the behavioralists claimed.
Recipients are passive receivers of external supply. Thought, vision, consciousness, sensation, all were viewed as the external continuity, the whole living world of sensation. This may be proven with appropriate instrumentation in angular geographic examinations. It will then be found that sensation and consciousness vary completely with natural locale. The supposed “homogeneous conscious space” is overthrown by experiment.
Beyond this fact, human modes of experiencing the world surpass the mere examination of inertial pressures and forces. Human sensibilities inform science of realities and domains with which surpass the registrations of existing measuring devices. It has been difficult to develop inertial measuring devices which reveal any real interactivity with experience. EXPERIENCE surpasses measurement. Consciousness surpasses quantitative science. This is the very manifesto of Qualitative Science.
EMOTION
Quantitative science never considered the possibility that sounds contained “para-acoustic components” which stimulated human discernment with deeper than acoustic contents. These para-acoustic components are very evidently filtered away during the very act of recording, however advanced the recording mode. Human sensibility discerns the difference.
Exposed to the performance of virtuosi, the human sensorium responds to MORE than acoustic energies. The difference is one which is… felt. And CD recordings do not grant this sensation. We hear the high-definition soundwaves, but feel nothing. There is a very defined and curious lack of emotional response when hearing CD playbacks. It is an emotionless state which is disconcerting. There is a very insidious aspect to this media pervasion. Furthermore, one does experience strong emotional involvement with analog recordings…especially with the older bakelite cylinders and discs. The sensations received during these old analog playbacks are deep, permeating, and long-lasting. One experiences recurring emotional “flashes” long after hearing cylinders and old bakelite discs. In this capacity, these media behave more nearly like live performances.